Wolfrom Writes

A heartwarming story about a woman and her miniature companions? Or a cautionary tale on the dangers of non-union house elves?

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Maddy McKay and the Elves in Her House

by Regan Wolfrom

The scale was broken… that had to be it. How could it say that Maddy McKay was losing weight when everything else told her she was inflating like a balloon? Even her five tiny house-elves had noticed the lack of progress, though they had been far too polite to mention it… or most had been; Alberich Blue-hat often mooed now whenever Maddy walked into the room. Evidently, he thought he was being funny.

Maddy had done it all, Atkins and the South Beach Diet, the Subway diet and the one where you only eat cauliflower and raw salmon… and she’d been blasting her calves so hard they felt like two flabby rolls of patent leather. Alberich had even quipped that Maddy’s best chance of losing weight would be to saw off her legs and sew them into fine Italian handbags. She began to worry once she found his stash of sewing patterns and hacksaws of various tooth lengths.

So Maddy went further.

She now would skip lunch and then she’d skip dinner, trying to motivate herself with visions of the wondrous new clothes she could buy. Wondrous new clothes to attract all sorts of men, up to and including the dreamy Benjamin Trasett who lived across the hall.

One day soon, she told herself… one day soon… skinny jeans for oh so skinny legs, nice short skirts that flare out and stay miles higher than her knees, swimsuits that didn’t even come with matching shoulder covers… if only her body would cooperate.

At first Maddy knew nothing about it; she’d starve herself and exercise until she bled, going to bed exhausted and hungry, falling asleep to the skinny person clothes and inspirational strains of Project Runway and then dreaming of Tim Gunn’s shining smile and silvery coif.

And then she’d wake up the next day and drag herself into the bathroom, ignoring the creaks in her joints, the pains in her muscles, and the Holstein bellows of a sadistic blue-hatted house-elf; once there, she’d climb onto that scale once again.

And then she’d see exactly what she wanted to see:  pound by pound dropping away — she’d gone far past her goal, or so the little numbers told her. And the elves would rejoice, Elfriede and Vena hugging her ankles, Elga and Durin humping her heels. Even Alberich would seem touched by her progress, choosing those very moments to remind her that even cows have value beyond their flank steaks.

But though her weight seemed lower, Maddy’s clothes were never looser; in fact, they felt tighter, her shirts and her jeans squeezing her tightly like a full-body corset. It was like all her work was making things worse.

But after a month she had an idea; if mornings were rough, she’d switch to the evenings. The weigh-in moved to after her dinner, now a meal of hot water soup with a hint of scotch whiskey, and after she’d done slurping she would try on her clothes.

And so she did, and while the scale told the same lies the clothes now fit her better. So much better, in fact, that she felt like a woman again and not a tightly cased sausage. So she squealed with delight, knowing that this time it was different; this time her body was listening. And then she turned on the TV and soon fell asleep.

The next day she awoke with a smile and a deep pain in her stomach, and after a heavy breakfast of four oversized grapes, Maddy went to her closet to dress for work.

And the clothes didn’t fit; the clothes were too tight.

Maddy squealed in frustration.

And Alberich laughed. And then he mooed. And then he laughed again.

And Maddy felt he was acting a little suspicious.

She left her apartment and went across the hall, making sure that her house-elves had not come along. She knocked on the door of dreamy Benjamin Trasett, and he answered with a smile and a welcome fib about all the weight she had lost.

She asked for a favour, and Benjamin said yes; he always said yes, with a dumbfounded smile and a bulge of his eyes.

She went back to her apartment to lay out the trap. She needed a distraction, so she spun up her Tivo for the elves’ favorite show. And as every last house elf sat on the couch, eyes glued to The Donald and his tower of hair, Maddy laid out the sticky pads at the door to her closet.

And then she changed over to Runway and got ready for bed.

♥♥♥

The next morning came and Maddy’s life changed. She passed on the grapes and a reheating of last night’s soup of hot water; she got out the frying pan and a big stick of butter. And she made a new breakfast to kick off her new life.

She’d used up all five of the sticky pads at once. She found five tiny house-elves stuck to those pads, each one brimming over with remorse and carrying a tiny needle and thread. She’d realized only then that it had been a team effort.

And for the first morning in months her pants weren’t too tight. And her shirts hung too loosely, and even her socks felt too big. Just one night was enough to show her what’s what.

Maddy McKay really was skinny; her time had finally come.

In fact, she could probably stand to gain a few pounds.

Maddy looked back to her breakfast, in the frying pan she’d rediscovered at long last. She’d had a full serving of food, at least. But she could eat more.

She went back for seconds, and thirds, fourths, and fifths. It was the best meal she’d had in forever.

Her five tiny house-elves were completely delicious.

A story that came to me during my morning trip on the bus. It’s very short and very strange… much like those morning trips I mentioned. I’ve yet to figure out a way to also include the various smells I experience as part of my commute.

Next Story: Maddy McKay and the Elves in Her House >>

Not Even Once

by Regan Wolfrom

The strange and beautiful creature before him was as alluring as any woman Milden Rusch had ever seen, far more desirable than any of the girls Milden had tried so desperately to know in all his twenty-eight years of sexual frustration and heart-crushing loneliness. She was lithe and exotic and alien, but more importantly she was totally naked.

Her skin was soft and a little bluer than the women he’d once longed for, and her long spiny hair was a strong, resplendent pink; it reminded him of Juanessa Parker, whose hair he remembered at about the same color. He’d had no trouble falling in love, writing her emotive letters on affection, devotion and Panic! at the Disco, and then weeping in eighth grade chemistry the day she’d walked over and told him sorry, that he seemed nice and sensitive and relatively well-groomed, but that she had fallen in love with the church. Milden had found out soon enough that she was actually in love with two thirds of the varsity hockey team, as well as her recently paroled stepbrother. He’d discovered this last sad fact from a tastefully-directed vignette on America’s Most Wanted. The church had been a convenient excuse and nothing more.

Milden knew that this lovely and blue-raspberry tinted extraterrestrial would never feed him excuses or run off to assist a non-blood relative in a convoluted and woefully misguided dognap-for-ransom scheme. She wanted Milden and she had made herself abundantly clear earlier that day, right near the Cinnabon kiosk in the mall when she’d sidled up to him and licked his left cheek from chin to ear, marking him with her pungent and slightly sulphuric saliva.

He’d read all about her species, the Ysoynoo, and he had faithfully watched the videos on the German YouTube clone that lets you see boobies. He’d seen every last clip, dozens of them, where the four-breasted and eight-nippled alien from just left of Tau Ceti would choose a mate at the local comic book store or LAN tournament, following her quarry back to his mother or grandmother’s basement and making wild interspecies love until she had taken enough of his genetic material for new life to grow.

Neither the scientific papers nor the videos mentioned it, but he had read on a number of less authoritative websites that the Ysoynoo could smell a man’s virginity. Milden was sure that his personal musk could be detected from ten miles away.

But virginity didn’t matter anymore, not with this vixen hovering over Milden and his Transformers:  Revenge of the Fallen bed set, licking him in exotic places far to the south of his barely noticeable six-day beard. They were already further than he’d ever been before.

They were beyond when Shellie Knutsen had shown him the flecks of chewing gum wrapper trapped in her bathing suit, revealing that fleshy and wondrous piece of her that started where her upper thigh ended. And far beyond the time when Kyla Dumont had slid down the Double Drop waterslide but her bikini top hadn’t. Both were memories he’d always cherished, from prehistory, when his sex life consisted only of flashes of unexpectedly exposed girl parts at Raging Rivers Waterpark. But that time was over and he had moved to a new level of sexual intimacy:  actual physical contact.

The angelic and slightly reptilian Ysoynoo woman looked at him, her lizard-like eyes staring deeply into his. He moved to kiss her mouth but somehow landed on her sharp yet shallow nose. He wanted her to think it was on purpose, but he knew she would not be deceived.
She smiled with her pointy white teeth, allowing him to suck her right nostril with what quickly transformed into wild abandon.

Maybe she liked it, the unconventional and completely inexperienced way he gave pleasure. Had she been human, he still would not have known.

Milden had always made the effort to learn hands-on, offering himself to practically every woman he’d encountered, trying to get comfortable with the idea that it wasn’t desperation but raw desire that had led him to proposition the women of his grandmother’s bridge club. (Milden was no longer allowed near the living room on Tuesday afternoons.)

Only this strange visitor had found him worthy, and for that he was eternally grateful. He knew he had to tell her so.

“Thank you so much,” he said.

“It is my pleasure,” she said in halting English. “Do you understand what we are doing?”

“I understand,” he said. He wasn’t an idiot. He kissed her other nostril briefly to show the level of his commitment.

She breathed deeply, and he watched the razor-sharp whiskers on her neck rise and stand on end. Her cheeks now seemed more green than blue and he could feel the scales of her slender tail resting against his pasty white thigh.

“I need you to understand”, she said. “For procreation to succeed I must kill and devour you once we have mated.”

“Please,” he said in a breathless whisper, “don’t kill the mood.”

Milden dropped his head down onto his Optimus Prime bed-pillow, readying himself, steeling himself for what was to come.

He had waited fourteen years, half a lifetime as it would now turn out, for the several minutes of ecstasy that would finally make him a man. He wished they could all see him now, Juanessa and Shellie, Kyla and that cute deaf girl down the street who’d never thanked him for learning American Sign Language in an attempt to bring them together.

He wished they could all be in the room to watch as Milden gave himself once and for all to a creature who truly appreciated him, as he became forever-alone no more.

He hoped that the webcam would keep recording to the very end.

He took a deep breath.

“I’m ready,” he said.

At that moment, just before the sex and pain and excruciating death, Milden Rusch finally knew what it was to be happy.